On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

One of our campus ministry staff posted the following column from the NY
Times. I think there is much food for thought here, and I offer it as an
apology (in the older meaning of that word) for staking out a middle
position on the ID controversy that is so divisive in many places right now.
 I realize that the ground I occupy on that issue is pretty small, and I
don't expect it ever to be much bigger. Partly I occupy that ground b/c of
my own convictions about what the truth actually is, but I also occupy that
ground b/c of the kinds of things talked about in the second and third
paragraphs below. Discerning readers will see which parts of this apply to
the context in which I am using it, and they will begin to understand why I
find the politics of this issue so discouraging.

Ted

****************

 Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
The New York Times
March 2, 2006
Author: DAVID BROOKS

I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're
beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school
you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic
notes,
students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd
expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a
hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at
all."

But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up
with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great
education, no matter what college you attend:Read Reinhold Niebuhr.
Religion
is a crucial driving force of this century, and Niebuhr is the wisest
guide.
As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if everyone read Niebuhr, "The
devout
would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must
play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some
people
who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that
good and evil really do exist -- and that it is never as easy as it seems
to
know which is which. And none of them, so long as they absorbed what they
were reading, could believe that the best way to divide opinion is between
liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other."

Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The
explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of
philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of
persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that
the
worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker can all too easily
erode one's devotion to truth -- a devotion that is critical to our
integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially
soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about
politics
and punditry.

Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the
core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like
Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire,"
Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble
actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is
impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."

That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago,
during a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was
lost,
the entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've
got
to find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who
will
serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use
to
measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard
Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to
weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."

Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My
impression is that many students have turned into cunning little
careerists,
jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly
impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should
especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another
culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a
matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger
stage."

Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland
believes
that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence
suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for
students that lasts a lifetime."

Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations
you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and
function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.

Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to
know what a standard deviation is.

Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message
from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have
developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing
the
full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by
the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that
narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're
surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little
subdisciplinary empires.

But you can do it. I have faith.

 
Edition: Late Edition - Final
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 27

Index Terms: Op-Ed

Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times Company
Record Number: 2006-03-02-814830
Received on Fri Mar 3 09:52:33 2006